All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

View Processeses like a fu, fu
I don't truly enjoy many commands more than this one, which I alias to be ps1.. Cool to be able to see the heirarchy and makes it clearer what need to be killed, and whats really going on.

Enable programmable bash completion in debian lenny
The really awesome bash completion in debian seems to be an extra package now, which has to be installed. After sourcing /etc/bash_completion it completes almost everything (package names in apt... etc) :-) To make this permanent, put something like this in your .bashrc: if [ -f /etc/bash_completion]; then source /etc/bash_completion fi

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Yet another way to add a line at the top a of text file with the help of the tac command (reverse cat).

Print Memory Utilization Percentage For a specific process and it's children
Change the name of the process and what is echoed to suit your needs. The brackets around the h in the grep statement cause grep to skip over "grep httpd", it is the equivalent of grep -v grep although more elegant.

Keep track of diff progress
You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. $ find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular.

Lookup your own IPv4 address

download file1 file2 file3 file4 .... file 100

Burn an audio CD.
My variation on an audio burning command from commandlinefu - this one doesn't crap out if you want to burn a CD in a directory whose permissions don't allow it, and instead rips everything to /tmp. If you mount your music partition like I do using Samba, you probably don't have write permission inside that file system in order to create the temporary directory other audio burning commands here use. Not a bad idea to add cdrom to your groups, and /bin/eject with visudo.

Commit only newly added files to subversion repository

Show the total number of changes that every user committed to a Subversion repository
This saves Subversion's log output as XML and then runs an XQuery over it. This is standard XQuery 1.0 and should therefore also work with other XQuery processors. I have tested it with Zorba (http://www.zorba-xquery.com). XQilla (http://xqilla.sourceforge.net) also does it, but you'd have to save the query to a file and then execute "xqilla filename.xq". The query first finds all distinct authors and then, for each author, sums up the number of paths they have changed in each commit. This accounts for commits of multiple changes at once. The indenting space in all lines from the second one seems to be due to a bug in Zorba.


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: